Developments in communication technologies have resulted in significant advancements in media hosting technologies, and in particular, have led to the advent of users being able to freely upload content to, and search media content on, and download media content from, media-hosting systems. To illustrate, a user can use a search engine to search videos hosted by a media-hosting system. Based on the search query, many conventional media hosting systems search video titles or categories associated with a video to identify one or more search results. In response to processing the user's search, the media-hosting system can return a list of search results (e.g., a list of video titles) that the user potentially will find of interest (i.e., links of video titles pointing to identified videos). Accordingly, the user can select a result (e.g., select a link) to access a video.
Notwithstanding the advancements in media-hosting technology, conventional media-hosting systems suffer from a number of problems. One problem with many conventional media-hosting systems is that when a user searches for media objects (e.g., videos) related to particular content (e.g., subject matter within a video), conventional media-hosting systems often return search results in a form that are not indicative of the content within a particular result that may relate to the user's search. For instance, and as discussed above, returning a list of video titles often does not indicate much information about particular content within a video.
Furthermore, some conventional media-hosting systems, in response to a search, return an image representing an identified video, but the image is almost always irrelevant to the user's search related to particular content. For example, many conventional media-hosting systems assign a frame image from a video to represent the video. For example, some conventional media-hosing systems assign a first frame of a video (e.g., in the form of a thumbnail) to represent the content of the video, while other conventional media-hosting systems allow a user to manually select a frame of a video. As a result, the selected frame image rarely shows or indicates particular content features related to the search query initiated by the user.
Accordingly, conventional media-hosting systems often return search results that do not appear to be relevant to the user's search because the frame image does not allow a user to readily discern whether the video is related to the search query. In view of the foregoing, conventional media-hosting systems often cause users to pass over (e.g., not select, consider, or view) videos related to their search queries because the preview images do not appear relevant to the users' search queries. Consequently, most conventional media-hosting systems provide a search process that is inefficient and time consuming. For instance, due to the above described problems of conventional media-hosting systems, user's often have to spend significant amounts of time to perform multiple searches and view large portions of resultant videos in order to ultimately find a video having content the user seeks.
Accordingly, these and other disadvantages exist with respect to conventional media-hosting systems.